The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was intended to reduce inequalities in access to healthcare resources. However, a 2012 Supreme Court decision allowed states to opt out of a key component of the policy, leading to even greater variation in Medicaid’s implementation. Using this variation, we estimate the effect of the ACA Medicaid expansion and racial dynamics on federal Medicaid-CHIP transfers received by states at the county level. To do so, we use a difference-in-differences specification and allow the expansion effect to vary across counties with different population shares of Black Americans. We find that Medicaid expansion increases the funds that are sent to counties, but additional analyses show that the racial demographics of a county also serve to influence how federal resources are apportioned. Specifically, the analyses reveal a curvilinear relationship between the proportion of Black residents and the dispersal of funds.

The government plays first fiddle in European Union (EU) decision-making processes, but a role in EU governance is also performed by the national parliament, which has gained additional competence to submit reasoned opinions based on the subsidiarity principle and participate in the political dialogue with the European Commission. The authors trace the policy-shaping and policy-taking processes and explore the impact of parliamentary and government involvement in EU policy-making on belated and timely transposition of EU directives in the Czech Republic. This comparative analysis of six directives, of which three were transposed on time and the other three from the same policy areas not, shows that the connection between ex-ante and ex-post stages still seems weak, and thus, greater involvement by parliament in EU affairs does not alone affect the time of transposition. Instead, the capacity of the government, determined partly by the salience of the legislation and its characteristics, is the main explanation for the transposition delays.

This article studies the impact of the 2012 British austerity policies on youth political attitudes using a difference-in-differences. The study achieves this by combining longitudinal survey data from “Understanding Society” with a district-level estimate of the austerity shock that each individual faced between the years 2013 and 2015. The findings indicate that the welfare cuts had a negative impact on the political efficacy of young people, as they were more inclined to believe that public officials did not care about them and that they had no say in the actions of the government. Additionally, their satisfaction with politics, as determined by their perceived level of political influence, also decreased. Overall, the results suggest that the implementation of austerity measures increased the likelihood of political disenfranchisement among young people in Britain.

Strong climate policy is vital to tackling climate change, but even the best proposals can get watered down when lobbying occurs. This article analyses which interest groups lobby on EU climate policies and under which conditions these groups achieve their policy goals. We expect that both economic and political resources are important. Economic resources give groups the capacity to mobilise expertise, but an interest group’s success also depends on its congruence with public opinion, especially in a politicised area such as EU climate policy. To test our hypotheses, we focus on six EU climate policy issues for which we conducted expert surveys with lobbyists and a content analysis of 737 media statements in eight European news outlets, combined with Eurobarometer data. Our results show that interest groups with higher economic resources and with public opinion on their side are more likely to achieve their preferences on EU climate policy issues.

This article develops the concept of policy advisory system (PAS) management in recognition of the need to better theorise and empirically study how governments approach the complex systems of advice around them. In our analysis, we go beyond the conceptualisation of degrees of government’s “control” over advisory sources. We use the dimensions of government agency and discretion and argue that PAS management falls into four forms: authoritative, dependent, laissez-faire, or absent. Using evidence from Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, we explore how governments operationalise these approaches through a range of choices and practices. The analysis points to the need to recognise that attempts to manage these systems occur both proactively and reactively with clear differences in the broad or narrow scope of management efforts.

Policy change is not an instantaneous or linear process. In fact, change includes several mechanisms working in tandem and even against one another. This article examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on homelessness policy in Canada. In a sector that is already plagued with emergency responses – rather than long-term solutions – the pandemic has initiated a critical juncture where policy change is possible, but not guaranteed. Although the existing failures to alleviate homelessness in Canada make policy failings even more obvious, aspects of the pre-existing Canadian response to homelessness negate change. The pandemic, however, has led to temporary solutions and created a setting where long-term change is possible. Using over 150 primary sources, this article analyses mechanisms of change and path dependence in the pandemic response to homelessness. The presence of such mechanisms is tested in three major Canadian cities.

How might public policy changes affect electoral support for authoritarian regimes? Missing from the existing scholarship, which focuses mostly on regimes generating political budget cycles and manipulating electoral rules, is an exploration of how non-fiscal and non-electoral policies may impact incumbent support. We examine this issue with electoral and census data from one of the world’s most prominent authoritarian regimes – Russia – to evaluate the regime’s 2017 change to the policy governing native language instruction, which curtailed minority students’ ability to learn their native languages and faced opposition in some ethnic regions. Examining panel data on presidential elections using fixed effects models, our results reveal that the regime’s support decreased in titular minority areas in 2018. The results also indicate that some of these patterns emerged in previous national legislative elections and thus cannot be solely attributed to the policy change.

This article aims to map the political economy of top personal income tax rate setting. A much-discussed driving factor of top rate setting is the corporate tax rate: governments may prefer to limit the differential between both rates in order to prevent tax-friendly saving of labour incomes inside corporations. Recent studies have highlighted several other driving factors, including budgetary pressure, partisan politics, and societal fairness norms. I compare these and other potential determinants in the long run (1981–2018) by studying tax reforms of 226 cabinets in 19 advanced Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries using regression models. I find little evidence for the effects of economic, political, and institutional factors; instead, the main determinant of the top rate is the corporate tax rate. As corporate tax rates are still declining under competitive pressure, the recently set minimum rate of 15% will not stop tax competition from constraining progressive income taxation.

What explains different rates of positive asylum decisions in Western democracies? Legislators and bureaucrats respond to public preferences on immigration, though studies have not accounted for salience amplifying preferences. Using autoregressive models, I find relationships between salience, preferences, and asylum recognition rates in Germany and the UK, indicating that asylum administration responds to public opinion. High salience and more open immigration preferences are associated with increased asylum recognition rates in Germany, while lower rates in the UK follow high salience and restrictive preferences. Applications rejected under these adverse conditions precede increases in successful appeals, suggesting political pressure or their own preferences lead bureaucratic actors to reduce rates in the UK. These results do not support lobbying or a culture of disbelief as influences on immigration policies. Rather, they raise questions about Western democracies’ adherence to an international rules-based asylum system and highlight mechanisms by which policy responds to public opinion.

In 2010, the United States Congress placed a moratorium on earmarks – congressionally mandated spending projects. But did the earmark moratorium actually rid public policy of earmarks? I use earmark data and 2010–2020 state-level highway funding metrics to examine the relationship between previously expired transportation earmarks and federal highway funding during the earmark moratorium. Earmarks in the 2005 surface transportation law (SAFETEA-LU) continued to benefit certain states in 2020, even though the projects technically expired in 2009. This is because the funding “formulas” established by all post-2009 surface transportation laws were fully determined by the highway allocation percentage each state received in the preceding year, inclusive of earmarks. Further, I find the relationship between SAFETEA-LU earmarks and state funding disparities strengthened from 2010 to 2020, meaning the expired earmarks increased in policy significance during the moratorium. Highly earmarked states became even more advantaged after the earmarks were institutionalised into the highway funding formula.

Shared beliefs are seen as a basis for policy coordination in the literature. Actors sharing beliefs coordinate their activities in order to translate their beliefs into policies. However, the literature shows that actors also coordinate for policy change across such belief coalitions for diverse reasons. Drawing on the literature on incentives in collective action organisations, we systematise these motives. We argue that rational motivations, such as access to material resources, as well as relational motivations, including power and reputation gains, may convince actors to coordinate. Based on 25 semi-structured expert interviews, we illustrate our propositions with a case study on the motivations that led actors to coordinate and support a vocational education and training (VET) programme for refugees in Switzerland. Coordination between a coalition of VET actors and a coalition of migration actors succeeded despite divergent policy beliefs, mainly due to rational motivations.

Asylum seekers are often portrayed as “bogus refugees” who try to abuse a destination country’s generosity and protection. We scrutinise the use and effect of such a constructed abuse policy narrative in Swiss asylum referendums by examining the conveyance of this narrative by political elite actors (meso-level) and its effect on citizens’ opinion formation (micro-level). On the meso-level, our analysis shows that political organisations rely more strongly on the abuse policy narrative (1) if a referendum proposal contains more tightening as opposed to streamlining policies and (2) if their political ideology is to the right. While the first finding also applies at the micro-level, voters from both the right and the centre are likely to base their decision on the abuse policy narrative. The fact that this narrative is convincing for centrist voters is particularly important as they usually play a decisive role in the outcome of asylum referendums.

Environmental governance in many high-income democracies relies to some extent on self-regulation by the private sector. Yet, this policy mode is contested and proponents of top-down government regulation argue that voluntary corporate sustainability commitments remain shallow and rarely are more than greenwashing. I assess to what extent firms’ business conduct is subject to societal checks and balances, in particular, whether public support for regulation constitutes a control mechanism of corporate contributions to environmental goods. I rely on an original survey experiment (N = 2112) conducted with a representative sample of the Swiss voting population. The analysis shows that accusing firms of greenwashing reduces both citizens’ perceived effectiveness of self-regulation and perceived synergy of corporate profits and environmental protection. However, this attitudinal shift only translates into modest updates in respondents’ policy preferences. As a result, short-run shifts in public support for regulation are an unlikely societal control mechanism of business conduct.

Past scholarship has documented that the poor are more likely to withhold their policy preferences in public opinion surveys, suggesting income gaps in political engagement. Despite the wealth of scholarly interest in opinion formation, however, previous studies focused almost exclusively on opinion gaps in preferences, leaving income-related gaps in policy prioritisation virtually unexamined. Drawing on 596 public opinion surveys conducted with nearly 700,000 Americans over 55 years, we make a comprehensive attempt to examine income-level differences in “don’t know” responses to the most important problem (MIP) question. Our results show that the less affluent are more likely to say “don’t know” when asked about the MIP facing their country, even after controlling for various factors including educational attainment and political attention. Importantly, we also show that income-related differences in opinionation cross cut other socio-economic differences in policy prioritisation. These results have important implications for the study of public opinion.

How has public healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments for providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending for reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of healthcare equity and lower political corruption because the health sector is particularly susceptible to political spending. Our results, obtained using ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares estimations, suggest that higher spending targeted at reducing inequitable access to health has reduced COVID deaths. Consistent with the findings of others, our results indirectly suggest that health spending is necessary, but not sufficient unless accompanied by good governance and equitable access. Equitable health systems ease the effects of COVID presumably because they allow states to reach and treat people more effectively. Spending aimed at increasing health system capacity by increasing access thus seems a sound strategy for fighting the spread of disease, ultimately benefiting us all.

This article advances a theory that brings real-world outcomes into our current understanding of the dynamic relationship between public opinion and policy. It examines a vital public good – air pollution remediation in 319 American localities – and estimates a dynamic model of relationships among three key variables: public opinion, policy, and air pollution outcomes. The analysis focuses on both public opinion and air pollution outcomes as dependent variables. I find that public opinion reacts to changes in statewide policy and local air pollution, which suggests the public forms its opinions with whatever reliable information is most readily available. I also find that local public opinion’s impact on local air pollution is substantively meaningful on timescales smaller than 5 years, indicating that the additional policy effort prompted by public opinion change is sufficient to yield tangible real-world outcomes even in the short term.

Welfare is traditionally understood as social security decommodifying labour markets or as social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this article introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1901 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of taxes on imputed rent, deductibility of mortgage payments, housing capital gains tax, and value-added tax on newly built dwellings. Summary indices of homeownership attractiveness and neutrality of the tax code show that fiscal homeownership policies have been in decline until the 1980s and risen ever since. They are in place where finance is liberally and labour restrictively regulated. Contrary to the classical welfare state, they are not associated with an economic logic of industrialism or left-wing governments. They rather are an alternative to rent regulation used by Common-law jurisdictions or smaller countries. As welfare for property owners, the logic of fiscal homeownership welfare diverges from the classical welfare for the labouring classes.

Within the framework of the soft budget constraint problem, this article investigates the impact of a legislative reform that increased regional tax autonomy on the propensity of Spanish regional governments to incur a deficit. For this purpose, a dynamic panel data model is estimated, using data for the period 1984–2019. The sample shows a breakpoint in 2002, when the reform of the regional financing system came into force, providing Spanish regions with greater tax autonomy, more fiscal competency, and lower intergovernmental transfers. Results show that the budget constraint has hardened, as regions have fewer incentives to accumulate budgetary deficits with the expectation of future compensations from the central government. A comprehensive review of the evolution of other factors previously identified as determinants of soft budget constraints, and the analysis of two regions not included in this financing system, suggest no other possible explanation for these results.

Studies of multi-level blame avoidance strategies generally assume that (1) governments prefer to shift responsibility to other levels and (2) an unclear distribution of formal responsibilities complicates blame allocation to a single actor. Considering the temporal location of such strategies – in anticipation or as a reaction to adverse events – the article tests these assumptions. Drawing on the case of air quality policy in Mexico City, the article uses causal process tracing to develop the mechanism leading to an anticipatory strategy and its unfolding. If the distribution of responsibilities on connected policy instruments is clear and major political actors share power, then government levels from different parties engage in a joint anticipatory strategy to avoid crisis and keep stability. The mechanism breakdown leads to reactive behaviour and policy change. Contextual changes redistributing power can destabilise the arrangements, leading to reactive blame games, fostering policy change.